Behind the Story: Super. Freaky. Wacky. Creepy?

Bruce Feldman takes on Arizona Cardinals Fans.

Stuart Thurlkill

Dan Mitchell and crew look on nervously.

Fool.

That's the word that keeps coming to my mind as I think about this Fan Story. Fool. Not because taking on this assignment turned into a logistical nightmare. Or because of the teams I'd agreed to find fans for—I had a wonderfully quirky Dolphins guy and also a Titans fan in Cali who dressed his dog up as Rob Bironas, the kicker. It wasn't because the Arizona Cardinals fan I ended up following convinced himself that if he wore black on gameday and showed up with a container of milk, his perennial doormat of a team would be victorious.

Nope, it's because on the Saturday afternoon when I landed in Nashville to attend the American Football Coaches Association convention (part of my college football beat), I happened to get off the plane just moments before the Baltimore Ravens were about to attempt the game-winning field goal. I had missed almost the entire game.

I stood with my backpack slung over my shoulder amid two-dozen Titans fans staring up at an airport TV monitor. And I'm sure I was the only person hoping 61-year-old Matt Stover would split the uprights. It's not because I'm a contrarian, but because years ago I wrote a book about Miami football and Ed Reed was kind enough to write the forward for me. And with that I have become a Ravens fan, and since I mainly cover college football for ESPN, it never really seemed to matter. Until right now.

I could've cared less that the elderly woman in the Albert Haynesworth jersey gave me the stink eye when she spotted me pumping my fist when Stover came through. But then it hit me. Now I was going to have to find a Cardinals fan for my portion of the assignment for our Fan issue. Worse still, it had to be a Cardinals fan with some bizarre gameday rituals. But I would soon find out that's almost an oxymoron because as one die-hard Cards fan I eventually met pointed out: "We don't have enough of a history of winning to have developed time-honored quirks."

Fool. Again.

All of my colleagues who have agreed to work on this assignment have found these wonderfully quirky/bizarre characters and here I am on a snipe hunt.

That damn Stover kick proved to be a nightmare. I wrote in to Cardinals blogs. But never heard any response. I sent out mass emails. I checked with guys I knew who had played for the team years back to see if they'd recalled any such characters. I contacted the team's media relations staff for leads. My colleague Tim Struby posted on a Cards message board soliciting some guidance for my pursuit. What he got was five pages of non-leads that began with skepticism about whether a guy without an ESPN email address did in fact work for ESPN The Magazine. (A few ambitious posters Googled Struby's name and eventually found some of his work.) Then I went to the Arizona Cardinals official message board and posted another thread. Instead I got questions for career advice and how to break in at ESPN.

There was some bittersweet irony in all of this (isn't there always?). The Editor-In-Chief of The Mag, one of the quirkiest people I've ever come across, just so happens to be a die-hard Cardinals fan, so much so that I think he has a Steve Pisarkiewicz jersey. Home and away. And yet, he's off limits. Fortunately, he knew of a woman who knew a guy who knew a guy. And, thank heavens, that's how I met Arizona super fan Dan Mitchell. Once in Arizona, I didn't know quite what to expect. I stayed in the Airport Marriott and bumped into a friend who was in town to cover the game for one of the Denver papers. "You here covering this too, huh?" she asked.

Well, kinda sorta, but not really.

Turns out Dan and his buddies were pretty normal and quite hospitable. Of course I couldn't help think that if you had built up all of these superstitions to help spur your team on to victory, wouldn't it be a bit risky to throw such a curveball at fate by turning around and allowing a photographer and writer inside to document all of this?

Never mind. The Cardinals won and everyone in the house was happy.

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